Freeman starts upStart

Freeman has started upStart. Freeman's post is here.

We support first time technology entrepreneurs in India with guidance and initial funding to help bootstrap ideas into businesses. We invest a small amount of money (3 - 5 lakh INR) enough to support a team of founders working from home for 4 months.

Let the startups roll in!

During 2001, I was working at Avendus. Among other things, we helped startups raise capital from VCs. There were a lot of startups we liked and thought would do well. However, the Indian VCs were very risk averse. They wanted to see a clear revenues pipeline before anything else. I was personally quite disappointed with this attitude. Maybe this was due to the general mood prevailing then. At that time, I felt that Indian startups with interesting ideas in the Indian space were at a disadvantage compared to startups in US, Europe, Japan, Korea etc. I wish something like upStart was there at that time.

But, better late than never! Good to see something like this happen in India. In the US, YCombinator, started by Paul Graham, is based on similar principles.

There are many interesting points about the model upStart and YCombinator follow which benefit the entrepreneurs greatly as opposed to the traditional VC funding model. These include independent decision making retained by the founders and relatively low levels of equity that must be shelled out for funding, experienced guidance and other benefits like more effective networking. Most of these are detailed in different posts on Freeman's blog and YCombinator site.

If you are lacking imagination like me, and are looking for startup ideas then read this list of ideas at YCombinator. If something excites you or you hit upon an original idea (global or unique to India), send an email to upStart! How easier can it be to get started?